manoomin

not everything wild is better. i will still, on most days, take a mild and delicate lettuce mix over bitter dandelion, and beefsteak over venison, and a hearth over a campfire. but true wild rice, hand harvested and hand parched, compared to the stiff black domesticated version harvested by a sort of aquatic combine, well, there’s no comparison. and i’m not just talking color. although, take a look. i mean, can you stand it?

Northern wild rice (Zizania palustris)

48 leaves

this looks so organized and planned out, but really it is a random double scoopful of leaves from my side yard, cut with a hole punch into circles and laid out in a grid. nature made all of the details, and did all of the color matching for me.

brass section

some woodland virtuoso, please pick up these horns and play.

detritus

a pretty palette of autumn bits that have sifted through the matrix of stems i have laid away for deep winter inspiration. colorful stowaways rescued from the long darkness of a basement corner.

time has become meaningless

we had an early cold snap here. followed by unseasonably warm weather. then several inches of snow. and now almost 50 degrees at the end of november. i used to be able to keep track of the passing of time by the steady and predictable march of our northern seasons. but they are now less easy to read. the leaves on my maple tree this year died on the branch, still green. the forest floor looks different now with all the green leaves among the russets, browns, and yellows. eight months of quarantine have added even more to the current disorientation. days blur into weeks into months. and now even the seasons blur. hurry up 2021. i’m lost.